Anyone who lived in the Etruria and Cliffe Vale district more than 60 years ago will tell you their neighbourhood was the most visually offensive and environmentally polluted district in the whole of the Potteries.

Sentinel photographer and historian Ernest Warrillow lived here, describing and photographing ‘foul open water courses running parallel to the long and vast colliery and ironworks slag mounds simply known as the ‘tips’.’

The whole valley from the steel works to Stoke Station was so polluted with industrial poisons that it was impossible to actually see details of the landscape for black smoke and acid fumes from glowing and smouldering waste.

So bad, writes Warrillow, “that children playing on them were often overcome and brought to the infirmary where, with difficulty, they were restored to consciousness.”

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It’s all changed now. Industry has quit its occupancy of Stoke-on-Trent, making room for dull business parks, dormitory housing and green open spaces.

A first time visitor to Stoke-on-Trent would never guess the city was built on pits and pots.

So little has been left that post-Millennials will only have old pictures to look back on to see where their heritage came from.

Few people know first hand what it was like to be brought up in such an industrial environment, which is why it is important to retain some of the material artefacts as memory banks.

Gladstone and Etruria museums, Chatterley Whitfield Colliery, 47 listed bottle kilns, some remotely placed colliery winding-wheels, and a few Victorian potbanks is all we have left.

Sad to say such destruction is still going on, and it seems few people are bothered about it.

The Adderley Green gasholder

Some years ago I objected to the demolition of a gasholder in Etruria, close to the new housing complex where the developers ironically purposely preserved the historic frontage of the Twyford’s factory in Shelton New Road as a mark of heritage.

I recall Tristram Hunt and Matthew Rice supporting my pleas for the gasholder’s preservation on grounds that too much industrial heritage had already been lost.

My appeal to save this last community-based emblem denoting the progression of lighting and heating before technology took over was crushed with hardly any lament.

Now I see that the last factory-based gasholder in Adderley Green is about to be demolished, and I am beginning to grieve again, knowing no matter how much I protest, the disappearance of this industrial icon is inevitable.

In fact, its removal has been authorised, and Stoke-on-Trent’s last gasholder – a two-lift braced column-supported structure, to give its model type – will be gone for good.

Most people have responded to its removal eagerly, calling it an eyesore, unsightly and old fashioned. And of course everything they say is true – it’s all of those things. But it helps to tell us who we are, and how we got here.

Citywide land reclamation and the removal of industrial relics began in 1960.

And in all cases the projects have been welcomed for bringing light into a city of darkness.

We should, however, keep back some of the effects that explain why and how the machinery of our ancestors affected their lives.